2015 Chicagoans of the Year

To read what our Chicagoans of the Year have to say about themselves and their work is to feel a tingling optimism, if not a full-on jolt of hopefulness, about what the arts can provide:

"I certainly want to activate people."

"I want to build a community of young creatives."

"I realized, I have to use performances as a platform."

The Tribune celebrates these talented artists and cultural tastemakers for what they have done in 2015, but clearly they’ve made an impact on the years, plural, and their words point the way to heights we might yet reach.

Just when everyone thought Chance the Rapper was on the verge of following up his acclaimed 2013 mix tape, "Acid Rap," he went sideways. It proved to be a brilliant move. Instead of putting out another album under his own name, the acclaimed South Side MC threw some attention at his band, the Social...

This year's Chicagoan of the year for theater could have been the Chicagoan of the year in theater, or for dining, of any number of years. William Pullinsi, who is 76 and retires Dec. 31 as artistic director of the Theatre at the Center in Munster, Ind., has enjoyed a Chicago career spanning close...

The partnership that launched a new Chicago institution, the Chicago Architecture Biennial, was birthed at an old Chicago institution, Taste of Chicago. In 2012, at a Chef Du Jour event associated with the big food fest, Michelle Boone, the city's commissioner of cultural affairs and special events,...

From the outside, the offices of Kartemquin Films don't look like the offices to anything. They look like a house emitting a vague but lingering aura of artistic creativity. Founded in 1966, Kartemquin takes up the sprawling entirety of a two-story Roscoe Village residence (for a time turned into...

On a warm evening in early November, the Field Museum's massive central hall was more crowded than you'll see it even on a free day during Christmas school vacation, filled with people dressed in everything from business suits to Grateful Dead T-shirts. This cross-cultural assemblage was there...

If you're a jazz fan in Chicago and didn't hear Tomeka Reid this year, then you clearly don't get around much anymore. The remarkable cellist-bandleader-composer was ubiquitous on Chicago's stages and busy around the world. Better still, the high-profile events she played cast an overdue spotlight...

Vladimir Kulenovic, music director of the north suburban Lake Forest Symphony, is at once selfish and selfless, useful qualities for a bright, ambitious, young musician out to make a name for himself in the fast track of symphonic conducting. Selfish, because the Belgrade, Serbia-born American...

Sabina Ott is building a mountain. This ought to be welcome in Chicago, a land so flat it depends on the wind for topography. In Ott's native Los Angeles, where she was born in 1955 to Jewish emigres and in whose aggressive '80s art scene she first emerged, mountains are plentiful. Ott's, however,...